Acair Fearann

Since the weather isn’t cooperating in the slightest. Contemplating the best way to deal with the walk up from the barn….it has to be something a good sized snow blower can deal with. Shovels are out. Something that isn’t slippery, something that works nicely in the informal landscape, but is a straight path (see snowblower).

Possibly poured concrete, maybe with brick headers set to break the monotony and to be decent expansion joints. Maybe with a brick or stone turnaround at the top? Poured concrete is the most cost effective, despite the challenge of pouring it, but getting it to look good…that requires thought.

Still the mud doesn’t work, and shoveling….well for a lot of reasons I’m aiming at long term, labor saving improvements that will let either older people, or one person, deal with the place sensibly. The upfront costs are probably less than the long term ones, and as long as the aesthetic trade-off is minimal it makes sense. (in this case it is a positive in any sense, since Mud) The visuals haven’t quite clicked yet, but I daresay they will.  Who knows, maybe we will even deal with the power lines at the same time!

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I always have a justification for never getting around to washing the windows: it cuts down on the number of bird strikes. Sadly, once in awhile they do happen.

Yesterday I found this guy splayed out beneath a window looking rather drunk. Sitting very quietly in my hand in a warm sunny spot, first with a hand over his eyes, than just wrapped up, and then perched on a finger, for about ten minutes did the trick. (I didn’t want to leave him in the snow since a) it was cold and damp, and b) the neighborhood cat had just been down at the barn.) He finally perked up and flew off to the peach tree looking vaguely puzzled but no worse for it. The trick to picking any bird up is to get over the wings and in front of the feet with most of your fingers. The feet are the tricky bit, ideally you want to end up with them correctly positioned in your hand so that they can cling comfortably. But first is to get the wings controlled. Using your other hand to shade the eyes is also a good thing.

One of our prettiest sparrows:

https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Fox_Sparrow/id

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Old field stone wall, plowed to the uphill side, rough pasture to the down hill side.

This was taken in January….if I went to take this picture today, I would need snowshoes and the wall would be buried!

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Not much happening here! Waiting for spring mostly and being utterly consumed by work and an independent project.

Hopefully, that should even out next week in time for better weather and then we can see what is left of the gardens. Good thing we didn’t get ahead of ourselves and take any leaves off of things out there. March always takes longer than it ought. One gets impatient.

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Two feet, but close. And not melting anytime soon. March in New England can throw a wobbly with the best of them! It is awfully odd to see things looking and feeling like January, but with the wrong sun angle. We are awfully, awfully sensitive to that bright yellow thing up there in the sky!

May it all melt slowly and gently and at least take the edge off this persistent drought.

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It is cold out there! Spent the better bit of yesterday and today helping to move some older, very useful, but very recalcitrant farm machinery. It was fun though. Learning a bit more about tying down loads and moving things. And how not to move them.

At the end of the day, an essentially brand new, solid, much bigger Brush Hog (which has a date with the lower fields as soon as this snowstorm goes away). Another, heavier tractor in essentially perfect condition; it is probably destined for a forestry operation in the next few years. An arch (think a crane that can attach to any 3 point tractor hydraulic system), a disc harrow, a rake harrow, a lawn ornament plow (it was thrown in to the deal), assorted metal T-posts, and some hand tools.

We did turn down the beat up disc harrow, the old no-climb fencing, the old tomato cages, and God knows what all else hiding in the barn!

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Reposted photo, but it looks pretty much like that right now.

Not looking forward to moving some equipment on a windy hilltop tomorrow, but a friend’s old farm house sold (they are moving from Connecticut to New Hampshire…I can’t possibly! imagine why!) and we promised to get the equipment out of there so the closing could go ahead. But that is what hand warmers and good boots are for!

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I’ll be interested to see if they can perk back up again. I suspect they will. But even the snowdrops think that two nights of single digit temperatures is a bit much in March.  I have to figure out a better management of that area, the oak leaves are really out of control on that bed, much too thick for the spring bulbs to cope with. They tend to reduce the ability of the bulbs to colonize, and with weather like this they ironically tend to deceive the bulb, which thinks it is warmer than it actually is. (The early bulbs in areas without heavy leaf cover are sensibly waiting) But, they do keep the moisture level and nutrient level high, and that is a very good thing for the area as a whole. Complex things, micro-climates and ecosystems!

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One of the projects for this year is to get as many of the little unwanted trees taken care as we possibly can on the house lot. At this point, most of these are relatively ‘little’ ash trees. While ash trees can be spectacular, they can also grow into whip like forty to sixty foot tall spindles. The problem with those, aside from taking up space without any visual benefit, is that they are the most prone to the diseases and insects that are knocking out so many ashes. A dead chunk of ash falling from forty feet up is Not desirable.

We’d have dealt with them a long time ago. But, I know what I can’t do. And I can’t do precision felling. Nor am I willing to try to cut anything over the four inch rule. So they have stayed where they are.

But sometimes even precision isn’t possible. One ash tree that I have finally gotten sufficiently tired of isn’t that Big (around fifty feet). But there is nowhere to put it. Thankfully, a bucket truck can reach it from the road.  It really should have been gotten rid of years ago:

For scale the wall is about three feet high.

It is in the center back of the picture, you can see that despite that problem with the trunk it is developing a decent crown and is remarkably healthy. That actually makes it a more pressing concern: at some point the weight of that crown will snap the trunk at that point. The only place it wants to go is straight towards the camera. It could be slightly shifted to the left, but even that would cause major damage to the Star Magnolia, the middle shrub in the back rank of shrubs.

Hopefully, we can get it out and I can fill the hole with something more appropriate for the space.

Trees will fall over and they will bash things. But there is no reason to set up for trouble.

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